Climate Immobility in the 21st Century: A Political Ethnography of Staying on Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast (en Inglés) - Sarah M. Munoz

This book explores how policies, attachments to place, and climate change beliefs, influenced by powerful oil and gas industries, shape climate immobility. In the face of escalating climate change disasters in the United States, many communities are unable, or unwilling, to relocate, even as their environments become increasingly inhospitable. This phenomenon, called climate immobility, has long received less attention than climate migration, and is often explained through the lenses of place attachment, social ties, and material constraints. But as this research demonstrates, non-movement is also deeply rooted in ideological and institutional structures and shaped by local politics. In Southeast Louisiana, where the impacts of climate change are acutely felt, decades of infrastructural development, together with fossil fuel interests, climate skepticism, and cultural attachments to place, have locked adaptation onto a path that leaves communities, in essence, becoming “trapped” by policy.

It delves into the concept of “managed immobility,” where government strategies prioritize in situ resilience over proactive relocation, effectively immobilizing at-risk populations. By examining the political discourses and narratives at the heart of climate adaptation policies, this book uncovers how institutional and cultural forces bind people to their place of residence.